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A Ton of Dragon, Prancing on Cue

The DreamWorks touring stage spectacle “How to Train Your Dragon,” based on the 2010 film, with Riley Miner, left, as Hiccup and the lifelike dragon Toothless.Credit
Lisa Lake/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The splendid beasts of the arena show “How to Train Your Dragon” roar and growl impressively during performances, but it’s unclear how deeply they think. If I were those dragons, this is what I’d be thinking: “We’d better enjoy our moment in the spotlight while we can. Remember pick-up sticks?”

“How to Train Your Dragon,” which is scheduled to be at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island next week and the Izod Center in New Jersey in September, is a big, brassy live version of the popular 2010 film based on Cressida Cowell’s books. Backed by DreamWorks with what must have been enough money to buy a small country, it features 23 lifelike dragons that stomp around, blow smoke and fly, all quite convincingly.

This is no small achievement, given that the largest dragons weigh at least 1.6 tons and generally require three operators, one in (actually, under) the beast and two working animatronic controls from the upper rows. Not too many years ago children were wowed when a dinosaur in a museum blinked an eyelid. These beasts, developed by the Australian company Global Creatures, make those dinosaurs look positively prehistoric.

I got to meet them backstage last Saturday before an afternoon performance at the Verizon Center here. It’s an eerie sight, all those very lifelike dragons sitting motionless, waiting for the lights to come up and the curtain to open. Somebody could film a pretty cool horror movie there, the menacing creatures threatening to come alive at any moment. I preferred to view the resting beasts as pensive, thoughtful. I imagined they were pondering — just as I was — the implications of what it takes to entertain a 10-year-old these days.

“How to Train Your Dragon” is a story in which a young Viking named Hiccup, who has been raised in a culture that is terrified of dragons and bent on exterminating them, realizes that the beasts can actually be quite friendly and can learn to welcome human passengers when they take flight. Hiccup’s hardest job isn’t training the dragon he befriends but convincing his fellow Vikings to change their worldview.

Bill Register, the show’s production coordinator, said the biggest dragons have a skeletal structure fleshed out with foam and covered with a hand-painted skin made of quilted spandex. The surface looks like armor, but in many spots it’s actually squishily inviting, like a beanbag chair. As Hiccup discovers, dragons can be quite huggable.

Some of the dragons inflate. Some flap their wings and fly. Some have special tricks, like the Gronckle, which blows smoke rings and, because there is apparently a law requiring all children’s entertainment to contain a flatulence joke, emits confetti from its hind end. At its best the show also includes fire effects, but Mr. Register said I wouldn’t be seeing those because of the Verizon Center’s code restrictions.

The show had its premiere in Australia and was first seen in the United States in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., late last month. Two dozen more stops are planned in the United States and Canada over the next six months. What does it take to haul such an elaborate production from town to town? Thirty trucks, Mr. Register said. The traveling cast, crew and management number almost 100.

Photo

At the Verizon Center in Washington, with a Viking hat, for “How to Train Your Dragon.”Credit
Linda Spillers for The New York Times

Among the unheralded wizards in this show are the puppeteers at the back control area, making the dragons’ limbs and heads move. This isn’t a computerized show with the movements and sounds programmed in advance; it’s all done live, which requires considerable coordination among the people onstage and those in the booth.

“You can’t go on autopilot for any of this,” Gavin Sainsbury, the head of puppetry, explained from the control module — the crew members call it the Voodoo Lounge — while demonstrating the gear. That gear includes a keyboard that provides the noises the beasts make. On each key is written the sound made by that key: “Grr,” “Raw,” “Lowl.” There’s even a “Meow 1” and “Meow 2,” though you have to be listening pretty carefully to hear them during the show.

Not all of the creatures are gigantic. A scene in which Vikings wrestle with small dragons requires a human performer to don a costume in which his head goes where the creature’s behind is and his hands to go in the feet, so it looks as if the Viking is being swallowed. Is it hot in there? Apparently. Mr. Register said the costume has a fan built into the rump to keep the actor cool.

On the other end of the scale is the creature known as the Red Death, which is all of your nightmares come to life.

“This puppet to me represents a whole new dimension of entertainment,” Mr. Register said as we visited Mr. Death backstage. “It’s not 3-D, it’s not 4-D — you just have to see it.”

And when you do see it and the other dragons in action during the show, you have definitely seen something. This isn’t perhaps great theater. Human performers always have to struggle to be heard in an arena setting, and facial expressions and other tools of the actor are wasted.

But the young audience members in Washington, aside from a few who were screaming in terror from the get-go, weren’t much interested in the acting. They came for the spectacle, and they seemed to enjoy being part of it. The arena was aglow with the red and blue of the light-up horned Viking hats that were for sale in the lobby. “Made in China,” the inside label says. My right horn was no longer lighting by the time I got mine home. Even Vikings, it appears, have quality-control issues.

Anyway, there was plenty of dazzle on display, but there was, for me, also plenty of food for thought. A half-century ago, a kid could be kept reasonably entertained with a homemade sock puppet or a low-tech game of pick-up sticks. A few decades later it was a game of Pong. As for stage shows, the Ice Capades were once considered the height of live entertainment. Who could imagine anything grander than the Ice Capades?

Try to appease a restless child today with any of that stuff, and you’d be rewarded with: “Are you kidding me? Take that sock off your hand and get me some real entertainment.” We are, in other words, caught in a sort of kiddie arms race. And, as Martin Amis said, “Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.” More arena extravaganzas are coming: “Batman Live,” which has been touring the world for the last year, is set for its American premiere in Anaheim, Calif., in September.

It’s easy to envision that the formidable creatures of “How to Train Your Dragon” will meet the same fate as those pick-up sticks 20 years from now. “Is that all you’ve got?” the jaded children of the future will say. “Puh-leez. You’re boring me.” Sound man, press the key marked “Mournful howl.”

“How to Train Your Dragon” is scheduled to appear at Nassau Coliseum from Thursday through next Saturday, dreamworksdragonslive.com/tickets.php; $28 to $138.

A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Ton of Dragon, Prancing on Cue. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe